When I first saw the ad, I thought, “You know, I might actually pay money for that, and enjoy it immensely, despite knowing what it was meant to represent.” Such is my mercenary spirit when it comes to Oreos.

But alas, in attempting to deflect public criticism, Kraft was quick to point out that the cookie was not actually going to be produced or marketed, and that the ad was part of a “series of daily ads reflecting current events in a fun way using images of Oreo cookies and milk.”

Feeling not so much betrayed by a corporation’s crass attempt to pander to the gay community, as I was betrayed by having a super-stuffed multi-color Oreo dangled in front of me and then told “psych!”, I looked at the Oreo again through slitted, cynical eyes. Stripped of my illusions, I saw the cookie for what it really is.

A fake.

A cheap, Photoshopped fake.

I’d say look carefully at the image below, but in fact you can just glance at it for a split-second, because the tell-tale signs are crudely, amateurishly obvious. I’ve circled two vertically repeating patterns, but a third one is also obvious in between them:

Comments

26
26 comments

I don’t see it but on the other hand, I’m not wearing my glasses and I’m working off a netbook. Everything looks like an ant farm from my vantage point.

As you know, I did a bit of photoshopping and amatuer photography back in the heydey of my now-defunct blog. If I were to do this picture, I’d build the Oreo by dying several layers of filling with left over Easter egg dye, then build it back up. All told, it would take less than an evening to complete.

I see it now. I was looking horizontally. But a photoshop job would work on the layers vertically.

RE: “Feel free to apply your own metaphors, similes, and parallels. “

I find it odd that a movement so infatuated with the “pride” of a group of people, would pick a food as their emblem. If I’m proud of myself, does that mean that I have to be chewed properly, swallowed, bathed in digestive acids, and then um, moved back out into the real world?

Why are the colors separated? Why is red better than purple? Purple is a good color. It does not deserve to be on the bottom. Why weren’t the colors fully integrated? They could have done that IF THEY WANTED TO.

Not sure what you’re thinking. The problem is really that there isn’t a true blue. Rainbows sometimes are described as ending in blue/violet and sometimes blue/indigo/violet. The bluish layer is ambiguous. Other progressions I see are:

1) The primary color triad - red, yellow, blue (bluish?) - top to bottom on the odd filling layers.
2) The secondary color triad - orange, green, purple - top to bottom on the even filling layers.
3) The usual depiction of the electromagnetic spectrum - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet - as shown in many texts.
4) Some depictions of the spectrum extend beyond the visible to x-ray and gamma and denote them as black.
5) The colors used to label resistors run black, brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, grey, white.

The problem is that the blue in the picture isn’t a pure blue - it’s a baby/robin’s-egg bluish.

I could answer “true blue” (a missing pure color), black (representing “x-ray” - or given the topic “x-rayted”), or grey/white.

I’ll probably slap my forehead when I hear what you were thinking of, but I’m having trouble getting out of my physics-trained mental models.

So Doug (#23), you had it right when you identified the colors of the electromagnetic spectrum (which is why I included the word “physical” in my original clue). In the spectrum, each primary color goes through the intermediate blend before passing to the next primary hue. Only I saw it as a closed loop, and you saw it as a band.

Well, red is the primary color you mix with blue to get purple - so another layer of red would complete the sequence if your definition of “next to” doesn’t include periodic boundary conditions. When I ran through the sequence, I immediately tracked back up to the top of the stack to red complete it. Too much exposure to crystal lattices and modular arithmetic, I’m afraid! The cookie filling is a complete lattice cell that can be repeated as many times in one dimension. If you added another layer of red, you complete the single sequence, but can’t repeat it without double-reds at the boundary.

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